Rallying The Oppressed

"I just saw crowds of people and Ukrainian flags, but I felt in my stomach that I had to do something, that I needed to help them, because Syria has reached where it is primarily because of Putin's regime."
"So I got my flag and I went there to the protest. When they saw me, wow, they were so happy there were lights in their eyes. They recognized me as Syrian, and although I wasn't prepared at all, they asked me to speak a word of solidarity. So that is how I found myself speaking in front of hundreds of Ukrainians, and when I finished I started hearing, 'We support Free Syria, we support Free Syria'. So this is how it started."
"I noticed that the Bolivarian ideology is almost a copy of the Baathist ideology in Syria. It is supposed to be left wing, and in the name of anti-imperialist, everything is allowed, and there are what they call revolutionary courts where they crush the opposition."
"The same people killing our people in Syria are killing these people and their leaders in Lebanon. So they have invited all their members to this weekend."
"So now we have the Venezuelans, the Ukrainians, the Syrians and the Lebanese, and there are Iranians now too. It is the best thing that has happened to us Syrians here in quite a while, because we need all the support we can get, and our enemies are many."
Faisal Alazem, Syrian Canadian Council, Montreal

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The oppressed discover power when they multiply their numbers by joining forces, and their voices for reason and intervention, for fairness and justice become louder and more impressively noticeable when it becomes one voice, and they are empowered by their sheer force of numbers. Singly they are vulnerable, together they exert the emphasis of a common voice and a common goal.

It was a serendipitous situation when Faisal Alazem looked out the window of his Ville Marie apartment to see down below marching Ukrainian-Canadians on their way to a demonstration before the Russian consulate on Boulevard de Maisonneuve. So he decided he would go down and join them. And when they saw someone clearly not of their tribe, but interested and willing to be helpful in support of their cause, their cause became his and his cause became theirs, because it was the same cause.

Protesters gathered to march against the Syrian regime and ask the Canadian government to show solidarity and give humanitarian aid. (CBC) 

For Ukraine it is the domination of a fiercely imperialist neighbour, larger, financially stable, with a huge, well-provisioned military arrayed on their common border, threatening invasion; intimidation with violence to follow, and the end result, loss of independence and pride in heritage. For Syria it is the end of the road, with over 150,000 Syrians dead, 180,000 missing, and over nine million refugees abroad or internally. Those abroad are being fed and cared for by international humanitarian groups.

Within Syria's borders in places like the Yabroud refugee camp for Palestinians living in Syria there is another kind of warfare besides the constant bombardment of the military against the suburbs, levelling buildings to rubble, and killing outright and wounding Sunni civilian Syrians. If chemical weapons are removed from the arsenal, barrel bombs take their place, shredding people's bodies in bloody carnage. And starvation becomes another method of opposition annihilation.

Calgary demonstrators protest for Venezuela on Peace Bridge

So now there is a scheduled gathering to take place in Montreal on Saturday -- the posters for which read, "March for Syria: In Solidarity with Venezuela and Ukraine". That's inclusiveness. Activists from the pro-democracy Lebanese Future movement will be present and also Iranian-Canadians who long ago fled the Khomeinist Islamic Republic of Iran before they became victims other than refugees of the new regime themselves.

There is a recognition that the thuggish KGB Intelligence officer now heading the Kremlin is their common enemy. Vladimir Putin who protects the Baathist regime of Bashar al-Assad, and who makes common cause with Iran, aiding it in its nuclear technology zeal to achieve atomic weapons, and newly threatening Ukraine with secession-by-aggression. The tentacles of friendship and support between Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolutionary government and Iran complete the picture.

The Lebanese Future movement with which Montreal activists are aligned, led in exile by Saad Hariri, son of the Hezbollah-assassinated Rafik Hariri, in Liberal International, found a good deal in common with the others gathering to express their solidarity in actively challenging the social dysfunction of the tyrants using all means at their disposal to make life miserable-to-impossible for those whom they dominate.

Behind them all lurks Iran and its terrorist militias; Hezbollah dispatched abroad to commit atrocities in Europe and Latin America, and within Syria, as the Party of God, the death-loving, death-delivering party of avenging Death for the greater glory of fanatical Islam.